Ukraine as a new nation has to create a useable past, Arch Getty, Professor of Russian and Soviet history at UCLA told RT’s In the Now show. War criminals like Bandera, who killed a lot of civilians, are being praised by Kiev government now, he added.

RT:Mikhail Gorbachev saidthat snubbing the
Victory parade is disrespect for the people who suffered enormous
losses fighting Nazism. It's clearly not completely perceived
this way in th, e United States. Why is that?

Arch Getty: ... For Americans it was something
that they read about in the newspapers or something they heard
about on the radio. For the Soviet people it was in their
neighborhood, it was in their face- their houses were burnt,
their houses were bombed, their neighbors were slaughtered, their
family was killed. It had immediacy in their lives. But I don’t
think Americans can really understand very well, because for us,
in the US, it was something that happened somewhere else, but not
for the Soviet people.

RT:If Obama came to Moscow, would this be
perceived as weakness amid the current global geopolitical
climate in the world?

AG: I don’t think it would be by anybody who
fought in the war, or anyone who remembered the war, because it
was a joint allied effort. I don’t think it would be perceived as
a weakness by anybody who knew anything about the war. In fact,
you could even see it the opposite. Having had his sanctions fail
to resort to this kind of blockade it seems patty; it seems
juvenile, especially given the depth of the loss that the Soviet
people felt. You can almost argue that he looks even weaker by
not going.

RT:What's the attitude towards this victory
in the West now? Is it some kind of inconvenient fact when a lot
of what we’re seeing now is to paint Russia as an aggressor, to
sort of commemorate what should be a joint victory?

AG: I think it is an inconvenient fact. But for
a lot of Americans it is even not a fact at all because they were
taught in their schools frequently, that we, Americans, won the
war. The Soviet effort has always been minimized here, and that’s
happened even more lately. By the time we came ashore on D-Day in
June, 1944, the tide had turned on the Eastern Front against the
Germans for a year and a half. The Soviets faced 10 times as many
German divisions, as we did in the West. That is not a fact for a
lot of Americans because they are still living in ignorance of
who did what, who turned the tide and what the scale of the thing
was. And the more governments on all sides try to rewrite history
for their own current purposes the worse that gets.

RT:Shouldn't this victory be bringing
Ukraine and Russia together?

AG: It certainly should, but it is not, and it
won’t because Ukraine as a new nation, a new state more than
anybody else has to create a useable past, a useable history. And
they have done so in the most glaring kinds of ways that the
Ukrainian Prime Minister, [Arseny] Yatsenyuk has said that WWII
was about the Soviet Union invading Germany. War criminals in
Ukraine, Bandera, people who killed Jews and many others are
being touted as national heroes there for current political needs
of the Ukrainian leadership. I’m afraid these celebrations are
not going to do that simply because of the attitudes that are
being taken.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.